You can’t control the next algorithm update. You don’t own your Facebook Page, Pinterest Account, Google Local Listing, Yelp!, or any of the social media sites.

Owning a domain name is akin to home-ownership versus renting on social media. At the very least you can set up an About.me or Tumblr for your business and have a low cost web presence that allows a little more flexibility and clearer ownership for branding at a later date.

Ideally it should be your own website. At the very least you should own a domain.

The benefits are largely for business intelligence and tracking.

Keywords? Usually your businesses products and services. The content on your site is what you control. Make sure your content is marked up properly. Each one should have their own page. Each page needs title, meta description, h1, one (or more) great image with filename and alt tag targeted that contain your focus keyword.

After you collect some data you can get a little more advanced with keyword targeting after going through your Google Webmaster Tools data.

If you don’t have Google Webmaster Tools installed you aren’t doing SEO.

This post originated as a email from a friend that was asking about SEO advice for his employer. It’s amazing to see how far we have come in the search industry, and more importantly Google’s algorithm. The gist of the advice four years ago was to build links and not worry too much about content. It’s a complete paradigm shift from then.

Promotion is the new linking, and it’s largely on social channels, but the focus now is clearly on